Anne Tyler - A Patchwork Planet

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. It began to seem I would never get hold of this check. “I thought you mistrusted banks, though,” I said. “How come you’re not paying in cash?”

Mrs. Glynn lowered the check and peered at me over her eye pouches. All I’d done was delay things even further. “You haven’t heard a word I said,” she told me.

“Yes, I have! I promise! Change of dates, time speeding up, personal versus historical …”

“You’re still so young, you can’t imagine any of it will ever apply.”

“Believe me, I’m not that young,” I said.

She raised the check again, but only to blow on the signature. Then she said, “I do mistrust banks. I wouldn’t dream of using one if it were up to me. However, my monthly allowance comes from my lawyer, and he insists on sending it to an account. Any money left over, it’s my decision where I keep it.”

Now she was holding the check at arm’s length and studying her signature. She seemed to be having trouble placing the name. I shifted from my right foot to my left.

“The lawyer and my niece are in collusion, I believe,” she told me. “Sophia’s always nagging me: ‘What if the house should burn down? Or what if you were robbed? Half of Baltimore knows where you stash your money.’ ‘Fine, then, I’ll change the location,’ I say, and she says, ‘You are living in the past, Aunt Grace.’ ‘Indeed I am,’ I tell her. I tell her, and I tell that lawyer too, who’s young enough to be my grandson. ‘ You -all don’t remember the Great Depression,’ I say, ‘when banks were falling like building blocks and grown, respectable men were sobbing in the streets.’ ”

If the lawyer was young enough to be her grandson, he could be Sophia’s age. Were they really in collusion? Did they meet to discuss her problem aunt over drinks, over dinner, in some candlelit restaurant where I myself couldn’t afford to buy her so much as a salad?

Nowadays it seemed to me that anyone in his right mind would have to want Sophia for his own.

“But here,” Mrs. Glynn said, all at once passing me the check. “Tatters, say bye-bye to Barnaby.”

I folded the check and slipped it into my rear jeans pocket. “Thanks, Mrs. Glynn. See you Monday,” I told her, and I was out the door before she could get started on a new topic.

Down Keswick, down University Parkway, to St. Paul, and then over to Calvert. It was only the middle of March, but there’d been a burst of unseasonably warm weather — highs near eighty, the last few days — and people were jogging or walking their dogs or just standing talking on street corners, looking aimless and carefree. I felt I was back in high school. In high school, when I went out with girls, it always seemed to be spring; the girls were always wearing spring dresses, and I was in short sleeves.

Sophia lived in a solid old brick row house with wide front steps and a porch. It was just a rental, but she had fixed up the little yard as if she owned it; you could tell even now, when things weren’t blooming yet. And last weekend she’d bought two window boxes and set them on the concrete railing, ready to be filled with petunias as soon as all danger of frost was past.

It was her roommate who answered the door. Wouldn’t you know Sophia would have a roommate? Roommates are so wholesome. I picture them in quilted white bathrobes, their faces scrubbed and their teeth freshly brushed, although whenever I’d seen Betty she was wearing one of those pink trouser outfits that’re trying not to look like a uniform. She worked in a hospital; she was some kind of pediatric health care person. A bony, spectacled woman with painfully short black hair and paper-white skin. “Sophia will be down in a minute,” she told me, and then she went off somewhere and left me to my own devices. She disapproved of me, I sensed. Well, never mind.

I liked Sophia’s living room — the staidness of it, the good, worn furniture handed down from relatives. When I sat in her grandfather’s big recliner, it gave out a weary wheeze. Through the arched doorway I could see the dining room (claw-footed table, antique breakfront), and I knew that the kitchen, too, was comfortably old-fashioned. The upstairs I had to guess at, but I was willing to bet that she slept in a four-poster bed.

Now I heard her footsteps descending the stairs. When she walked in, I jumped up and said, “Oh! Hi!” as if she’d taken me by surprise. I don’t know why I behave like such an idiot, sometimes.

“Hi,” she said.

We kissed, and she stepped back.

She was wearing a navy skirt and a flowered blouse. She had this way of looking into my eyes and then quickly glancing down at her own bosom and smiling.

“Come into the kitchen,” she told me. “Supper’s almost ready.”

The kitchen table was set for two, and the Crock-Pot on the counter gave off the smell of tomato sauce. In the mornings before she went to work, Sophia would put supper in the Crock-Pot. Then when she got home all she had to do was fix a vegetable. I don’t know when the roommate ate. She never joined us, although if she happened to walk through the kitchen Sophia always offered to lay a place for her.

“How was your day?” Sophia asked, emptying a box of frozen peas into a saucepan.

“Oh, pretty good.” I sat in a chrome-and-vinyl chair that must have dated from the forties. “Your Aunt Grace had me take down her storm windows,” I said. “I told her it was too early, but she insisted. ‘Mark my words,’ I told her, ‘winter will be back before next week is out,’ but you know how she is. Monday, I’m putting her screens in.”

“I can’t imagine why she bothers,” Sophia said. “She never opens her windows anyway.”

“No; most of that age group doesn’t. Scared of burglars.”

“With her, it’s she’s eternally cold. You’ll see: she’ll be wearing a sweater in July.”

I liked the thought that I’d be seeing Mrs. Glynn in July. That meant I’d be seeing Sophia too. I studied the back of her neck as she worked, and her smooth, netted bun. I hadn’t seen a hair net on a bun in years, and now I wondered why; this one was so seductive. All I could think of was slipping it off, letting her hair tumble out of it.

She filled our two plates and then sat down across from me, smoothing her skirt beneath her. Her thighs, I thought, would be very pale and soft and fleshy. I stared at her like someone in a trance, till she asked me, “How’s the stew?”

“Oh! Delicious,” I said, although I hadn’t yet tasted it.

She raised her wineglass. “To us,” she said.

“To us,” I repeated.

The way she served wine tickled me: one glass for each of us with each dinner, already poured beforehand. Me, I was used to drinking either not at all or far too much. This moderation business was a whole new approach.

Upstairs, the roommate’s shoes were creaking back and forth. I heard a door slam, then a drawer bang shut. “Is she mad about something?” I asked Sophia.

Sophia shrugged, which was answer enough.

“She thinks I’m a loser, doesn’t she.”

“Heavens, no! Why do you say that?”

I sliced into a chunk of potato and said, “She’s pointed out to you that I’m basically no more than a manual laborer. That I have the fashion sense of a Hell’s Angel, and my prospects for advancement are flat zero. Right?”

Sophia flushed and looked down at her bosom again.

“Not to mention I hold the title of World’s Oldest Living Undergraduate,” I said. Then I said, “Hey. You didn’t tell her about the Renascence School and all that, did you?”

“Certainly not,” Sophia said.

Even Sophia didn’t know everything; just the more dashing highlights. We were in that stage where we were formally presenting each other with our pasts: Sophia’s prim, Mary-Janed childhood, my nefarious adolescence. I liked the fondly nostalgic way she said, “When I was a little girl…,” and she liked the fact that I’d have struck her as slightly scary if she had met me in my teens. “You were one of those boys who hung around the corner in packs,” she’d surmised. “Who piled twelve deep in a car and hooted out the windows. Who smelled of cigarettes when they brushed by me on the sidewalk.”